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A cancelled flight forces Boise State to take a bus to Kentucky

Leon Rice

Boise State head coach Leon Rice during practice for a first round game of the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament, Tuesday, March 19, 2013, in Dayton, Ohio. Boise State will play La Salle Wednesday evening. (AP Photo/Al Behrman)

AP

The inclement weather that made Sunday’s east coast NFL games so entertaining has been wreaking havoc with the travel schedules of a number of college hoops teams.

Over the weekend, a handful of games were cancelled or postponed. Today, word came down that Fairfield would be postponing their trip to Belmont because the Stags are unable to get out of Connecticut.

But the most notable weather-related travel issue is that of Boise State. The Broncos are in Lexington right now where they will face off with Kentucky tonight at Rupp Arena. Boise State is the nation’s highest-scoring team, a group loaded with perimeter players that are more accurate shooting a basketball than Mark Wahlberg was with a sniper rifle in ‘Shooter’.

Hopefully, that long-distance accuracy won’t be ruined by the fact that the Broncos were forced to take a bus from Chicago to Kentucky thanks to the cancellation of a connecting flight. They were supposed to land in Lexington at 3:30 p.m. local time on Monday, according to the Idaho Statesmen. Instead they took a seven-hour bus ride, arriving at midnight. That forced them to miss Monday’s practice and turned what should have been a long travel day into nearly 18 hours in transit.

That’s a long time for a bunch of tall athletes to spend scrunched into seats on a plane or a bus.

“We’re not going to use it as an excuse,” Boise State coach Leon Rice told the paper. “The only thing that makes it difficult is the team we’re playing Tuesday. Our guys are pretty resilient, so I think they’ll handle it well.”

“They’ve handled it well, and handled it well in the past. My first year (in 2011), we got caught on Donner Pass on our way to Nevada. We had to eat one of the freshmen.”

The good news, besides the fact that all the freshmen actually survived that trip? Boise State beat Nevada.

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